Barack Obama backs Israel remaining a Jewish state

Until Vice President Dick Cheney's famous accident last year when he mistakenly shot his partner during a quail hunt, it was Benjamin Harrison, the 23rd president of the United States (1889-1893), who provided the previously most amusing presidential hunting-related incident. While in Maine, he aimed at what he believed to be a raccoon, only later to discover that he had shot dead a pig belonging to a local farmer.

The anecdote was brought up by an analyst scrutinizing with amazement the numbers coming out of Iowa voter surveys one week before the primary for their party's presidential candidate. The three-way Democratic race is very close. Hillary Clinton has managed to garner between 24 to 30 percent of the vote, John Edwards, 18 percent to 26 percent, and Barack Obama - 25 to 33 percent of the vote according to the opinion polls.

Some will say the numbers show Obama is in the lead; others will assume that such a split can only show one thing: any raccoon can turn out to be a pig.

Like all election campaigns - and this one even more so - the main question is who will turn out at the polls. In the case of Iowa, going to the polls means leaving home on a very cold evening for a few hours, because they don't actually vote, they caucus. Since every pollster choses the formula by which likely voters are defined, the question of who will win depends on that precise formula more than the answers given by those polled. Out of the many pollsters covering Iowa, only one managed to predict the outcome in the correct order of the 2004 elections. The last poll of Selzer & Co. puts Obama at the top, Clinton second and Edwards third. More...